Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:23AM
from the competition-is-grand dept.

redkemper writes with an excerpt from BGR.com of interest to anyone in the market for a new phone: "Samsung's Galaxy S 4 might not offer much in the way of an exciting new exterior design, but inside, it's a completely different story. The retooled internals on the U.S. version of the Galaxy S 4 were put to the test by benchmark specialists Primate Labs and the results are impressive, to say the least. The Galaxy S 4 scored a 3,163 on the standard Geekbench 2 speed test, just shy of twice the iPhone 5's score of 1,596. That score was also good enough to top the upcoming HTC One, the Nexus 4 and the previous-generation Galaxy S III."

Faster in some senses.. the dual core did better in some areas than the quad-core (due to the faster clock speed even if it isn't a massive clock-speed jump). I have a Quad-Core international (since my wireless carrier doesn't have LTE and is going HSPA+ instead) vs some of the people I know who have the dual-core US one.. (one of which said they thought the screen on my international seemed clearer than their US one although I think that was in their head)

Qualcomm's "Snapdragon [wikipedia.org] has good in-package support for cellular flavors in common use in the US. As can be seen in the wikipedia list, that puts them in quite a few US-release phones, even from people like Samsung who have their own SoCs.

The international sgs 3 is better, the US sgs 3 isn't.I was never sure why samsung put a slower soc in the phones that went to the US.

because you're(assuming) stupid enough to buy the shit US operators sell you on partial payment plans on their quirky networks they like to choose quirky tech for so that it's harder for you to switch operators and harder to buy phones from open market.

I'm more surprised that they were so close.... That's actually a vote in favour of the Apple offering, because Apple's slower processor with half the processing cores will use less battery....

Is not quite that simple - the quad-core 1.4GHz might be able to finish some intensive operations significantly faster than the dual-core 1.3GHz, allowing it to go back to a low-power state earlier and save more battery.

It's not really that straight forward. For many tasks, multi-cores are under-rated, it just depends on the task and how the software is written. Multi-cores are not particularly helpful with single threaded applications though, true.

Most well-written software should be threaded and evented... the front end should run in a separate thread from backend processing, with updates coming from state snapshots... Not a huge number of threads, but even a few can breakup workflow and logic so you can scale. The biggest issues is a lot of less-skilled developers make a *LOT* of mistakes in dealing with multiple threads, where you are best off really understanding race conditions, and/or keeping common points immutable with atomic changes, and ma

Huh!? Your first assumption is incorrect!
Listening to music while system is checking the email in background and you browse a site IS taking advantage of multicore systems on desktop OR a phone, as long as the OS scheduler is multi-core aware. Phones are multicore to accomplish such parallel tasks.
Applications don't need to be aware of multicore. OS scheduler will take care of that. [linux.no]

They're not. [cpubenchmark.net]
In single-thread performance, the very fastest CPU (Xeon E3 1290 v2) at 3.7 GHz (2178 Passmark) is only 2.5x the speed of the Pentium 4 3.8 GHz (866 PassMark) from almost 10 years ago! Going down another factor of 2.5x puts you at the P4 1.5 GHz (344 Passmark), which was released only 4 years before that, in 2000.

Put another way, if you go back 10 years from the P4 3.8GHz in 2004, you are at the Pentium 75 in 1994. I don't even know where to find a single benchmark to compare the two! The

Is not quite that simple - the quad-core 1.4GHz might be able to finish some intensive operations significantly faster than the dual-core 1.3GHz, allowing it to go back to a low-power state earlier and save more battery.

In theory, yes. In practice, if that were going to be a significant factor, then wouldn't the benchmark show a significantly higher score than the 1.4GHz quad? The two were close enough to make me wonder, is all.

Maybe that's true, in theory. But in my experience with both android and iOS is that iOS ALWAYS has more battery life that android. It's more noticeable the larger the device. My iPad outlasts my Nexus 7 by such a large margin that it's a joke. My Nexus 7 spends more time charging than it does being used (and that's not an exaggeration).

Apple just does battery life better. I've never seen a case where any android device beats it unless you get into outliers like the Motorola Maxx phones which have craz

I would posit that it depends on the applications running... iOS is much more integrated than Android... by the same token, Windows Phone 7 had really good battery life, and reasonable performance on much lesser CPUs, but that's because most applications were hibernated before switching tasks... Of course complaints were pretty significant.

Also, many android apps include spyware services that run in the background (which is why I try to pay a lot of attention to them), why does a flashlight app need full

but simply the fact that more expensive device that came out, what, 6 months later, performs less well. Most end users would probably be a bit suprised to find that out given that they'd expect the more expensive device to perform better, especially when it was so much newer.

I'm so over this meme. all new top-shelf cell phones cost the same. $199 with contract. All cheap bargain bin cell phones cost the same. there is no such thing as "iphone more expensive than galaxy s"

You may not be an Apple fangirl, but you're obviously comfortable being a bit dishonest with the truth when it comes to Samsung, so fangirl or not, you're still a twat.

thank you, what was missing from this conversation was a bit of misogyny.

Well that would be interesting to wait for the benchmark. The Exynos contains 2 set of 4 cores: 4 slower set for battery optimising and 4 faster for CPU intensive application. The speed difference may not be that important, by design, the battery should be the main difference between the 2 (with the 8-core being significantly better). That make sense btw, with modern phones, your main concerned is keeping it powered, not really CPU speed.

I've had two smartphones now, the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream, and the Samsung Galaxy SII. It's not about the phone speed, it's about the applications and the connectivity. If my wife's Palm T|X was a phone and had the ability to synch to a server automagically like Android does with Google's applications, she'd probably still be using it. Having the web is nice, but having the e-mail, calendar, contact list, music player, e-book reader, camera, picture viewer, and calculator are what make the device so useful. For me, it's a tool first and foremost, and the toy gadgets aren't what make it why I carry it.

(I hate the "preview/submit" feature, seem to lose a lot of posts that way, this is a retype)

To use your example against you, I started a new position as an infrastructure specialist a year ago, working with someone with 13 years experience at the same company. I got outfitted with a new Ryobi 18V tool set so that he and I could share batteries with his decade-old 18V Ryobi tool set. The power drill from his set has places for two bits, the plastic housing is sturdy, and the bit holders don't lose their bits easily. My new one has a flimsy plastic housing the deforms under pressure, has only one position to store a bit, and the bit frequently pops out. The only new feature on my drill is a little LED that's supposed to shine on the work area while the drill is in use, but that feature is negated by the need to use bit extensions to reach into wire management and server racks with equipment protruding.

So, newer is definitely not always better, even when the newer product is a direct successor-in-market to the old product. The Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volaré were arguably worse cars than the Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant that they replaced. The Netbook type of computer was a lesser product than the Subnotebook type it replaced. The modern Craftsman any-fastener wrench is a lesser product than the 12pt wrench as while it technically fits everything, it fits nothing especially well.

iphone has always needed less CPU/RAM resources than android. i have a droid pro i carry for work and my wife's old iphone 4 with only 128MB or RAM was a much better phone

I'm actually surprised the S4 only scores twice as much as the iPhone 5. Given the latter is still just a dual core 1.3GHz processor. The S4 is a 4+4 ("octacore" if you want to believe the marketing) running at 1.5-1.8GHz. Geekbench takes cores into account, so it should be much more than double the iPhone 5.

The iPhone is definitely not cutting edge technology, despite what some people believe. The iPhone is more the tried and true stuff, although I think most people use it for the software, not the hardware. However, for those who like power and fun in their pockets, the S4 is the bomb.

And the scores scale linearly, so you can just divide the scores of the new Samsung quad core by 2 to get a rough comparison with the iPhone 5. This gives an estimate of SIMILAR single-threaded performance between the two.

There are variations not handled by the simple comparison method (e.g. bandwidth-limited scaling of more cores, or clock turbo/throttling depending on number of cores used), but it's a pretty quick and fairly accurate comparison.

why do I need such a powerful computation engine in my pocket? the main use I see is if it gets to be good enough to be a desktop replacement and I can just dock it to a big screen. But until then having more cpu or GPU isn't going to let be surf the internet faster or type e-mail faster or even give me longer battery life. THe existing ones already play HD movies so the frame rate threshold has been reached for highly satisfactory video.

SO what's the killer app for increased CPU? playing halo? Nice but not a killer app for a cell phone I think. I just can't think of anything in terms of compuational horsepower that I would like my cell phone to do that it doesn't do now and for which the cell platform is the right place to do it. I need help with my imagination I guess.

For me the thing I need on my cell phone is vastly more battery. Why? Well aside from the obvious of longer charge time, you could probably vastly increase the communication rate and reliability by broadcasting more power. You could certainly increase the amount of time you would be tempted to use video (battery consumers).

only reason to buy an iphone over android at this point is games. i play real racing 3 on my iphone 5 and the graphics are about as good as my xbox 360. ipad 4 has better GPU and will be slightly better.

and if you have an apple TV you can output the game to your TV to make it like a real game console and that takes CPU power as well as a nice wifi router

Seriously, Apple takes great care to make sure battery life lasts as long as possible.

I'm not saying the S3 or S4 are bad phones, but I think we can be sophisticated enough to worry about overall experience for what you are trying to accomplish.

Maybe I want a faster processor and lower battery life. But I agree with you. I don't see the killer app that requires a super-charged CPU.

That's an interesting take considering the talk time, standby time and battery capacity stats are firmly in the favor of the samsung devices. The s3 out talks the iphone5 by over two hours. No telling what the s4 will do, but based upon their trend, it will improve on the s3.

Actually, at around the time of iPhone 4, Apple started putting in some good specs. By the time the iPhone 5 came out it, was among the fastest phones. This is in direct contrast to the early iPhones which had tragically bad specs.I mean it seemed to me the were targeted at complete retards - people would show me their (gen 1) iPhone and say "look at how well you can browse the web". I could see how the UI of the browser was an improvement over my 3-year old PDAs (Axim X50v) browser, however trying to read on that half-VGA screen would give me instant headaches. Yes, my 3-year old PDA has twice the resolution and a faster CPU. In fact, even before that, my ancient (2003) Toshiba e805 had a 4" screen with full VGA resolution. Consider also the fact that the iPhone originally did not support apps, it should become apparent that the touch-friendly UI alone would not have given momentum to the iPhone release if it was not for marketing and fanboy-ism.And yet it is surprising that people would call the original iPhone e.g. as a "high resolution display" device. There were devices at least 2 years older with 3x the resolution (but Nokia was too stupid to make a phone back then based on the N770/N800), but they were "invisible" to people.After Apple opened a new market and everybody jumped in, then they started trying to compete on merit and not just style.Another reversal that has happened is that now iOS is the least innovative OS. Android - though I am still not a great fan - evolves quickly and I have seen UIs made from scratch (e.g. Swipe UI on Maemo/Meego) look like they are coming to us from the next decade (in look and functionality). Instead of a modern OS on retarded hardware Apple now offers modern (at least relatively) hardware on an aging platform. The only thing that hasn't changed is that you always get less functionality than the competition and you can't change the battery or add memory...

Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None. They've complained that the Galaxy models are too hard to keep working. The strange thing about it, Cyanogen works for Samsung on their Android Team.

Question is, will that affect your decision to buy or not buy the Galaxy S4.

Personally, I'm not likely to buy another non-Nexus device. You can't trust Samsung to update the OS, and it's nice to be able to remove any custom Samsung software. Third-party ROM support is never guaranteed, and is often required for non-Nexus devices, even just to fix security vulnerabilities.

i was going to "buy" a free Galaxy S2 for my mother in law 2 months ago. main reason was that it was getting ICS and maybe even Jellybean.

as far as the point updates, don't really care if my phone has 4.2.1 and the latest is 4.2.2. i update my iphone 5 to the latest ios when its released, but don't really see any difference. the one difference i saw was a bug where my phone wouldn't work with my car's USB except on locally stored music. it was fixed in the last month and now i can listen to spotify and pand

Samsung has to be one of the best at actually updating. The issue I think you're seeing and wrongly blaming on Samsung is your CARRIERs lack of updating. Both my Galaxy S and Galaxy S 3 are unlocked units from Immix Wireless. They don't screw with the ROMs or anything else. My wife had a Verizon Fascinate (a Galaxy S phone) and while my Galaxy S was getting updates from Samsung fairly steadily and was at 2.4.3 IIRC before I went 3rd party ROMs, my wifes fascinate was still back on 2.3 (or at least 2.3.x).

The Galaxy S line is just 3 years old and can support 4.2.2 through CyanogenMod. It should be supported by Samsung for 3 years as well, I think. 2.3 is ancient (as Android versions go), and was out when the S line was still being sold. Admittedly, keeping an Android phone up to date with the latest version isn't that important for features because of overall flexibility, getting security updates is.

Unfortunately that means you will be stuck with the Android version that comes with your device until Samsung and your carrier decide to upgrade it. That takes a loong time after Google releases updates. I have a Galaxy SII running the latest version of Android (4.2.2), but if I had not rooted it and switched ROMs, it would be running 4.0.4.

the way android OS versions are buying something like the S2 which has ICS is perfectly safe from an application compatibility standpoint. ICS is at its peak installs now so it will be at least 2 years before good apps will require jellybean or something later

I can understand. I feel like most people hanging on rumors and press releases about the newest phone or operating system fail to realize that mobile phones are a hobby, not a necessity or something of great importance.

Installing CM on my phone was fun, but honestly, it's still the same phone it was before, just with different standard backgrounds and a few apps that were bundled in with it. Jailbreaking my ipad was a bit more functional, but at the end of the day, I tinker with my devices because I

Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None. They've complained that the Galaxy models are too hard to keep working. The strange thing about it, Cyanogen works for Samsung on their Android Team.

Question is, will that affect your decision to buy or not buy the Galaxy S4.

The only reason I picked up a Galaxy S3 is because it was CM10 supported. 2 hours after purchase, warranty was voided and CM was running on it. So no CM, no sale.

Personally, I find the stock Samsung roms to be perfectly good. I've rooted my S3 and disabled a lot of the built-in Samsung apps, but apart from that, it's still running the latest official Samsung firmware. It does everything I want, so I see no reason to change for the sake of it. (In other areas/devices I'm an incorrigible modder, so this isn't just apathy, this is the 3rd party roms not being compelling enough to change).

If I still have my S3 in a year or so when Samsung have stopped releasing updates

No, because CM for the Galaxy line has been okay at best for a while now. Once they started getting into 9 some funky stuff happened, such as Spirit FM or whatever the radio app is called you had to use since the stock FM app would't work in CM 9. Issue was, EVEN IF YOU WERE USING HEADPHONES ANY AND ALL TIMES THE FM RADIO APP WAS IN USE, your external speaker could (and fairly often like mine DID) die. At first it sounded like it was blown, and then less than two days later it quit working at all.

Reading that link, they talk about not wanting to deal with Exynos. In the USA, however, we're going to get the Qualcomm Krait version. Qualcomm has been much better with releasing usable sources than Samsung. And Cyanogen works for Samsung USA, so it would seem to me that getting an SGS4 is a safe bet in the USA if you want Cyanogenmod.

CyanogenMod is posting across social networks that this is just the opinion of some of the devs, but is not the stance of project.

Found on G+ just now:

Let’s start with the simplest form of this: CyanogenMod does not pre-announce support or lack of support for devices. Ever. Even for the Nexus 4, we did not announce support until a nightly build was available. Further, any announcement regarding the ‘dropping’ of device support will be communicated via this Google+ page, Twitter, Facebook, our blog, or a combination of those; it will not be something buried in a forum post.

This morning, a comment from a CM collaborator on XDA was taken to be as an ‘absolute’ in regards to support of the S4. He offered the opinion of four TeamHacksung maintainers, their frustrations and lack of interest in supporting the S4. What’s seemingly lost on those reading this is that his comments as an individual do not speak for CyanogenMod as an organization.

As for the team’s stance on the S4, there isn’t one at this time, and most definitely won’t be one before the device is sold at retail.

There are two major variants of the Galaxy S4 - Qualcomm and Exynos based. Similarly there are two major subvariants of the GS3 - again, Qualcomm vs. Exynos.

The Qualcomm-based GS3s were very well supported thanks to Qualcomm having excellent reference source at CodeAurora.

The Qualcomm-based GS4s will probably be OK because many of the Qualcomm GS3 maintainers aren't as pissed off at Samsung as the Exynos guys (including myself) are.

The four primary Exynos4 maintainers (myself, Daniel Hillenbrand, Guillaume Lesniak, and Espen Fjallvar Olson - I may have missppelled thos slightly as we usually just go by IRC nicks) have all decided that we won't be touching any further Samsungs. We're all working with Nexus or Sony devices now. (Sony has done a MAJOR turnaround in terms of opensource support over the past year, or at least the Mobile division has.)

This probably has little impact on the Qualcomm-based GS4s, but right now, the Exynos-based GS4s are without any prospective maintainers.

Will a new maintainer step up? Possibly. Will they succeed without just saying "fuck this shit" and selling the phone for a different one? I personlly don't think so.

It's a volunteer project so nothing is ever a surefire given, and collective decisions are rarely made - so far, they have only been made in regards to outdated hardware and newer versions of Android. (Such as Snapdragon S1-based phones ending at CM7).

That said, if you look at the attitudes of developers, you can "get a feel" for how likely a phone is going to be well supported by CM.DISCLAIMER: THE BELOW IS MY PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT IN ANY WAY AN OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE PROJECT:Will the Qualcomm-based GS4s receive maintainer attention and continued support including M and stable builds? I'd be surprised if they didn't.Will the Exynos-based GS4s receive maintainer attention and M/stable CM builds? I'd be very surprised if they do.

is there any software that actually takes advantage of this? there are only a few games that take advantage of the iphone 5's graphical power

not like most people are going to dump their S3 or iphone 5 and run out to buy the S4 just because it gets better numbersi know someone who is going to buy the Galaxy S3 this week if he gets if for $99 on T-Mobile. he doesn't need the S4's power and price

I can't find any app which taxes my 2 year old Desire HD (Single core 1GHz Scorpion CPU, part of MSM8255 chipset). I think mobile processing has come to the same point as desktop processing; For 99% of the tasks, 2 years ago is more than enough (5 in desktop, really). The "new shiny" is for posers.

at least the S4 is going on sale next monthfor the next 6 months i have to read how the Tegra 4 is the most awesomenest mobile chip even though there aren't any products on sale that have it. but all i have to do is keep waiting and not buy anything else

Wow, now it's fast enough to run Crysis 3! Oh wait...that's right, it's a phone. Apps are written for the slowest Android devices for the biggest marketability so that speed means nothing and does nothing but waste battery life. Maybe it can process photos faster with a built-in app or something faster but who cares? Most people run 3rd party apps the vast majority of the time. I would much, much, much rather see a doubling of the battery life than a doubling of the processor speed.

I don't think apps are written for the slowest device. My experience with Apple IOS and devices of mixed age is that over time the apps seem to target faster and faster CPUs, either by doing more things or adding new features.

Every so often I grab an old iPhone 4 we use for a home phone and try to use Instacast and it about locks up updating 4-5 podcasts, yet it's like glass on my iPhone 5.

One of the benefits of Apple's walled garden approach (yes, we all know the perils of walled gardens, I love rooting and installing CM, too)

Apple currently has less than a dozen total devices still supported. That's combined between all phones, pads and pod-touches (not counting pod-shuffles - they don't get apps.) On those, only 2 or 3 potential OSes are supported, with the current OS installed on over 60% of applicable hardware.

This makes it very easy for app developers to optimize apps for the majorit

Wow, now it's fast enough to run Crysis 3! Oh wait...that's right, it's a phone. Apps are written for the slowest Android devices for the biggest marketability so that speed means nothing and does nothing but waste battery life. Maybe it can process photos faster with a built-in app or something faster but who cares? Most people run 3rd party apps the vast majority of the time. I would much, much, much rather see a doubling of the battery life than a doubling of the processor speed.

Samsung claims the SIV has best-of-breed voice control. What they demoed looked very impressive, even though it might have been staged (indeed, it happened on a stage:D ).Regardless of whether the SIV demo was staged or not, the fact remains that good voice recognition requires a lot of processing power. Bear in mind that the voice recognition process must run in parallel to whatever app is being controlled, so more cores can come in handy.

Speed does mean something. My 2 year old Nexus S has frequent delays of 5-10 seconds. It seems slower than when I bought it, but I can't see any reason why Google would make their OS slower, so I have no idea why it's like that. If there is a delay of order 100 ms, it may be caused by frequency scaling and other power saving features, but multiple second delays would definitely be fixed by a faster CPU. There is also RAM, though. Hard to tell if it's swapping or running at full speed when it's all solid st

As long as we're going down the road of matching cores and RAM to that of nearly current desktop specs, why not nail down some standards for connecting peripherals? And no, I don't mean shitty proprietary bluetooth/wi-fi protocols. I mean a standard mini-usb dock with VGA, HDMI, DVI output and a few USB ports for a keyboard and rat. Something that can be implemented by the entire range of Android devices whether it's HTC, or Samsung, or Motorola. Otherwise, I see no point in phone with 4 damn cores and 3-4

You can get a dock for the Note that is compatible with the S3. It has a HDMI port and several USB ports. There are only two downsides: It costs around $80 to $100, and it doesn't necessarily work with USB ethernet.

Oh, and with the S3, you can get a simple USB OTG cable to hook up a keyboard and mouse (using a hub). It also works with USB hard drives. When I connected my USB ethernet adapter, it fried the phone. Instant death. They replaced it under warranty, but something is very wrong with the desi

Given that the S4 has twice the cores of the iPhone5, this seems reasonable, if not a bit disappointing. I'd be curious to see some real-world benchmarks to see how actual apps fare, as they typically won't be making use of all 4 cores. For instance, while the S3 international flavor scores higher than the iPhone5 on this chart, there were many real world tests that the iPhone5 easily won.

I'll be anxious to see real world tests and see how well the S4 is making use of all of the available cores.

This raises an interesting question: is there a suitable replacement for blackberry for the enterprise yet? None of the phones systems/solution I've seen have anything resembling the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) and encryption for email, etc. What will be the successor to BB in the enterprise?

Seriously, all of the other vendors, with perhaps the exception of Microsoft, have been focused on home users, not the enterprise. So, I guess the answer should be Microsoft, but Blackberry still has the better enterprise solution.

Microsoft is sort of a funny one: their attempt to push Windows Mobile devices into Blackberry's market back in the day was largely a failure, and is totally dead now; but did manage to win 'Activesync' enough support among enterprise admins as the 'Hey guys! we are totally kinda, sorta, adequately endurable compared to BES!' alternative that devices from Apple and the droid crowd that support it were able to absolutely brutalize Blackberry in ways that Windows Mobile was never able to, and Windows Phone se

I'm in finance (about as regulated for email as you get) and we use iphone, ipad, and android for work email now (as well as bb). So when I'm in country, I don't carry my bb anymore, just my personal as I can check the email via the Good app. I'd ditch the bb but I'm on international business often enough and if I do, my company won't pick up the tab for my calls and roaming data while on business.

This raises an interesting question: is there a suitable replacement for blackberry for the enterprise yet? None of the phones systems/solution I've seen have anything resembling the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) and encryption for email, etc. What will be the successor to BB in the enterprise?

BES was always a half-assed and expensive solution to the regulatory problems US corporations have with email.

The real question i'd like answered is for someone to benchmark the GS4 Snapdragon version VS the GS4 Exynos 5 version. If the Exynos version benchmarks higher, I may have to fly out to Europe and pick one up.

Why would you spend considerable money and fly thousands of miles (I'm assuming you're in the USA) to pick up a phone that's faster in synthetic CPU benchmarks but may not be fully compatible with next generation 4G networks here in the USA? What do you do with your phone that requires the fastest possible CPU? And what do you do every 6 months when a faster phone comes out?

Wow, I am really disappointed that I had to scroll down 2/3 to find the first comment asking this very question. Thank you, AC. Phone benchmarks?? Really??? I mean, this kind of benchmarks doesn't even matter on desktops, except for workstations, why are we doing this same crap on PHONES?